Bunny was alive.
“Wasn’t glanders after all,” Tea Cake, who’d helped me dress before we left the infirmary, said as he carried me to the barn.
After all that time out to pasture, Bunny smelled like earth, fresh turned in the sunshine, when I hugged her neck. Having Bunny gave me heart. Her living and being healthy enough to carry me to Mexico was a sign that things were going to work out.
Tea Cake got her tacked up, lifted me into the saddle, and led Bunny out of the stable.
Fernie Teague ran after us, demanding, “What you think you’re doing? You aiming to steal this horse?”
“Yes. I am,” I answered. “And the saddle, tack, and all the feed I got packed up back there, and the canteen I filled.”
“I don’t believe you can do that,” Fernie said, confused.
“I’m doing it.”
“I’m a report you.”
“I hope you do. Tell Drewbott to send a detachment. And tell them to be ready to shoot the woman he commanded for two years in the back because the only way I’m coming back here is dead.”
Outside, I found a couple dozen troopers waiting in the yard. They were a mournful crew, heads lowered, none of them even able to look my way. I took it as shame and a sort of apology for not stopping the mob and allowed as how they might not all be mangy curs.
Pinkney the cook stepped forward, dumped some potatoes and onions into my saddlebag, looped a couple of full canteens around my saddle horn, and said, “Cathay, before you go out there, I need to tell you something,” he started off, his old watery, stewpot eyes filling up.
“No need, Pinkney,” I cut him off. I didn’t have time to listen to him blubbering in the way drunks were wont to do while he told me how sorry he was he hadn’t stood up for me. They were all ashamed, thinking of what I was going to tell the Sergeant about them.
Unable to use my heels to spur Bunny on, I clicked my tongue and my sweet, loyal, good, and true mount ambled forward at the speed she preferred, a tortoise-slow walk. We rode on through the silent crowd of men. A couple of them glanced up, almost started to speak, then stopped. I guessed that shame was crushing the words right out of them.
Night was falling and the barracks Wager and me and the rest of the company had built were lost in shadow. My hitch had been hard and had ended bad, but I’d done it. Done every blessed thing any other trooper had done. And I’d met Wager. And that was worth it all. Worth another fifty years if it came to that.
Wager. Wager is waiting for me.
I sat up straight in the saddle. The barracks blocked my view of the open prairie beyond. Stars shone in the navy blue sky above them. It was stupid to set off this late, but I didn’t care. I’d keep the North Star shining on my back and ride south without stopping. To Wager who’d lift me gently from the saddle and take care of me.
The lone soapberry which had greeted me when we first arrived was a black silhouette now against a sky nearly as dark. As it had welcomed me to the fort, the tall tree would send me on my way as I passed beneath it heading south. As I drew closer, however, a broken limb dangling oddly from the soapberry caught my eye. The limb was thick and the branch it hung from bowed with its weight. Bunny shied back and I reined her to a halt.
Before I really knew what I was looking at, I had started praying to Iyaiya, all the ancestors, the Twin Goddesses, and Lord Jesus Christ to make the shadowed form I saw hanging from the soapberry tree a trick of the darkness. It couldn’t be a man, his face hidden by a hood. It couldn’t.
I was clucking Bunny forward, when from behind came the loud clicks of many rifles being cocked.
“Halt!” Drewbott ordered.
The white officers surrounded me. There were seven of them. They didn’t move or speak. Into the silence came the mournful hoots of a couple of billy owls. The snuffling and grubbing of a skunk pawing at a cholla root. The lonely sob of a Mexican wolf rose in the distance.
Drewbott faced me.
I knew what hung from the soapberry tree. “He crossed the border,” I charged Drewbott. “He was in Mexico. You’re not allowed to go after a man in Mexico. He was free.”
“We’re the goddamn United States Army,” Drewbott barked, his voice still shrill from being dried out in the desert. “No one’s free until we say they’re free. Carter, seize this … this deserter.”
“Colonel,” Carter said, his voice low. “Are you sure you want to do that?”
“Why? Do you have another bright idea? Your brilliant plan to let Vikers and his men go to the infirmary and ‘deal with the problem’ didn’t quite pan out, did it, Carter? What else do you suggest?”
“Let her leave.”
“Wouldn’t that be a fine example to set? If we let desertion go unpunished, the darkies will turn on us. We’ll have a full-scale mutiny on our hands. They’ll come for us. All of us. Our wives. Our childen. Is that what you want, Carter? The deserter must hang.”
“Sir, are you sure you want such a, uh, public proceeding?”
“What would you have me do? It’s too late now for the sniper. Sheridan himself has taken an interest. He telegraphed. This person is known to him. A report must be submitted. Protocol must be observed.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” Carter said. “But isn’t this just the sort of story that might whet the appetite of a newspaper reporter? Woman goes undetected in a peacetime army command? That’s news, sir. In any event, a trial means there will have to be an official admission that—”
Drewbott finished Carter’s thought. “That I had a … a … female under my command for two years.”
“Under all of our commands,” Carter added. “After the recent events…? The deaths in the desert? The unsuccessful hunt for Chewing Bones? There is certain to be an investigation. Maybe even—”
“A court-martial?” Drewbott said, his voice wavering.
The men’s conversation meant less to me than the wolves howling in the distance. It was too dark now to see even the outline of Wager’s body hanging from the soapstone tree. My thoughts were muddled. All I’d been certain of from the instant I knew that Wager was dead was that I no longer had any reason to go on living. Since I had no weapon to turn on myself, I decided to charge the men. They would be my firing squad.
My mind was made up, I was bracing for the final pain of thumping my heels against Bunny when Drewbott said, “Yes, yes, Carter, I see your point. We simply let her ride away. We’ll muster her out later. Discharge her for medical reasons. Have the quack in town sign the papers. You’re right. Who cares if she tells her story? No one will ever believe that a woman served for two years in the Buffalo Soldiers. Most citizens can’t believe niggers of any sex can be real soldiers. Yes, let her go.”
I don’t know if Wager or Iyaiya put this knowing into my head or if it came to me on its own, but I saw clear as day what was going to happen: these white men would erase us. Not just me, but all of us. The noble and the wicked. Wager and Vikers. Lemuel and Caldwell. No history book would show us putting up the telegraph lines and guarding the stagecoaches, tracking Indians and making the West safe. Hell, they might not even show the armies of black cowboys that rode the Texas ranges. Or any of our boys who fought in the Rebellion. Solomon? Would they erase Solomon, too?
I’d been as good as dead the instant the soapberry tree came into view and I cared naught for my life. But Wager? And Solomon? Lem? And all my people who’d died serving the United States of America? I’d be damned if I would let them bury us all twice.
I came to the sad conclusion that I had to live.
I made to ride off and Drewbott spurred his mount forward. “Give me that jacket,” he demanded. “You’re not leaving here with any evidence of your … your treachery!” he exploded.
“Drewbott,” I answered, forever done with “sirring,” “if you want this jacket, you’re going to have to give me all the sweat I put into it first.”
“Go,” Drewbott hissed. “Get out of my sight.”
“Happy to, you half-witted, yellow-bellied horse’s ass.”
A burst of chain lightning stitched across the black of the north sky. From way off in the night the Mexican wolf called out his sobbing wail. His mate up North answered with her own heartbroken cry. Bunny and I headed in her direction.